We are all on the hero’s journey through the epic adventure of our lives … whether we like it or not.

Perhaps you’ve heard so much about the power of positive thinking that you’re just about to puke if someone tells you to think positively ever again.  But there are ways to practically think positively rather than look at the world through rose colored glasses welded to your face.  One of the ways practical positive thinking works is to look at your life as a mythological adventure, where you are the reluctant hero.  This helps gives meaning to some really crappy times in your past.

For example, I fell head over in heels in love with someone who tuned out to be a monster in human form.  Even though I left him years ago, there are times I still dwell in the past, railing at the injustice of it all.  Now I can look back on this hardship as what Joseph Campbell called "being in the belly of the whale."

The Hero’s Journey

Although you might not feel like a hero, just discovering how to have a happy, fulfilling life is adventure enough.  One of the reasons all myths pretty much follow the same storyline (what Joseph Campbell called "the hero’s journey") is that the point of myth is to help teach us how to get through our own lives.  A hero’s journey tends to go into this pattern:

• Adventure calls to hero
• Hero says "no" to adventure
• Hero reluctantly gets dragged kicking and screaming into adventure
• Hero is in deep trouble — such as Jonah when he was swallowed by the whale
• Hero finds skills or gains boon in order to fulfill terms of adventure
• Hero goes home and brings newfound gains to benefit community
• Repeat as necessary

Seems kinda familiar, doesn’t it?

Relating This Stuff to Real Life

Everyone is on their own journey, so you are not more important in the scheme of things than anyone else — however, you are not any LESS important.  We’re all like strands in a net — bits to make up an important whole.  So, if anyone stresses you out, they are usually not out to get you.  They have their own problems with their own hero’s journey.

If you look back on the past with anger, that only serves to stress you out in the present.  Look on it as a necessary step in the development of your heroic journey.  For example, my disastrous relationship helped me develop my writing voice, which in turn makes me better able to write to help others (I hope!)

So, in practical positive thinking, bad news will still happen to you.  But at least you can have the strength to ride through the bad times and see a point to it and that it will work out all right in the end (even though the end may be years away). That can make a big difference in your overall stress levels.

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